Turning Her Back On The World

Tina Mcelroy Ansa's Tale Of A Most Unusual Wife And Mother

Mudear is dead, but even now, as her body is at the Parkinson Funeral Home awaiting burial, she looms over her husband and three daughters like a malignant force of nature. She looms, too, over "Ugly Ways," Tina McElroy Ansa's second novel, as a character who refuses to fit snugly into an author's fiction. She rings too many bells for the reader, taps too many deep-seated fears and desires, to be constrained by mere plot. Indeed, she so dominates Ansa's story as to overshadow even its imperfections.

This is not surprising. As drawn by Ansa, Mudear is larger than life-at least, that's how she's been ever since "the change" years ago. That was when Mudear-the word is short for "Mother dear"-turned her back on the rest of her central Georgia world and on her responsibilities as a mother and a wife, and began living her life for herself alone.

From that time, it was, for Betty, Emily and Annie Ruth Lovejoy and their father, Ernest, like sharing a home with some mythological god, a being beyond rules, sharp in her easy cruelty, cold in her lack of concern for others, hard in her self-sufficiency, demanding in her self-centeredness and, for all that, still hypnotically attractive to the family she dominated.

After the change, Mudear had nothing to do with anyone outside the home except a lone friend with whom she occasionally talked on the phone. She never got out of bed before midafternoon. She did nothing around the house except watch TV for hours, luxuriate in the well-appointed comfort of her private bathroom and order everyone else around. She never left the house, except to tend her huge backyard garden, and that was only after sunset.

Her three children, who ranged in age from 5 to 11 when they began to have to fend for themselves, knew things weren't right. "Hell, I used to read books just to find out how normal people, families live," says Annie Ruth.

She taught her daughters, from infancy, to repeat, mantra-like: "A man don't give a damn about you." She would summon her girls individually to her room and then demand of them: "If me and your poppa was to get a divorce, who would you go with? You can't run with the hares and hunt with the hounds in this life. Choose."

Mudear and her family are black, but hers is a story that has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the primal dichotomies of freedom and responsibility, selfishness and selflessness.

Once the change comes, once she finds a way to turn the tables on the world and live absolutely the way she wants to, Mudear becomes the embodiment of freedom. And isn't freedom, especially in American culture, what we all want? But here is a woman who actually leads an unfettered life-and leaves her family scarred and twisted.

She is the evil mother of fairy tales, the one that every child, no matter how good his or her parents are, fears to get one day. Yet she is also the guilty dream of every father and mother. Which of us, in our heart of hearts, hasn't at one stressful moment or another, while bringing up our children, wished it were possible to just drop the burden from our shoulders and be free once again?

But for all her cruel tyranny, Mudear doesn't seem a monster. Her children and her husband, as they sleepwalk through the day before her funeral, remember not only her ugly ways but also her strength, intelligence and beauty.

Mudear, Betty recalls, "was never as pretty as any of her daughters, but she had a way about her, a confidence, a sureness in the way she moved, in the way she squatted down in the dirt next to a plant with real tenderness, a tenderness she never showed her family, that was downright seductive.

"And she could throw back her little pea head and laugh with such a robustness and a sense of abandon and irony that her daughters learned to talk about people in Mulberry and on television and in the news with a cutting wickedness just to hear her roar."

The reader sees these qualities, too, not only in the recollections of husband and daughters, but also in Mudear's own commentary as a disembodied (but far from disinterested) spirit watching her family work through their complex feelings in the aftermath of her death.

"I did so love to dig in the dirt," Mudear tells the reader with an undeniable gusto. "I was just a born gardener. I could taste the soil and tell whether it was acid or alkaline. When I woke up with dirt under my fingernails, it was some of the happiest moments for me. . . . I guess my garden is the thing I'm most proud of. Other than seeing my girls do so well, of course."

Ansa, author of the well-received 1989 novel "Baby of the Family," does a good job of capturing the running monologues inside each family member's head but stumbles with conversations, often letting them turn into speechifying. And the last two chapters don't ring true- as if Mudear couldn't be contained by any ending.

Perhaps she should have skipped those final chapters and simply ended the novel with Ernest Lovejoy's one-sentence eulogy at Mudear's one-minute funeral service: "Esther Lovejoy's life spoke for itself." Amen.